Seventy years ago today, Roberta Joan Anderson was born in Fort Macleod, Alta. She grew up mainly in Saskatchewan, as a dreamy, creative — but inwardly rebellious — girl who wanted to be an artist. As Joni Mitchell, she went on to paint the landscape and provide the soundtrack for an entire generation of women’s lives. Mine included.

When I was very young and looking for love, there were the haunting chords of Blue and the vulnerable admission that when her “old man” was gone, “the bed’s too big, the frying pan’s too wide.” Decades later, when someone I had loved died, I drove around in my car, listening again and again to the overlay of the cicadas chirping and the lush lyrics of Night Ride Home. Her songs have always had the power to short-circuit my senses, to bring me back to who I was when I first heard them.

A great, cranky and singular artist, Joni has always been unwilling to be owned by just about any faction that would claim her, including those battalions of adoring women, one of whom purportedly said to her in a bar: “Before Prozac, Joni, there was you.”

Today she’s turned into an irritable truth teller, an equal opportunity naysayer, deriding feminism because it resulted in “masculine” women, and sneering at the era of free love — “just a ruse for guys to get laid.” She also said recently she doesn’t trust the Internet.

Never mind that the Internet, those YouTube videos of her concerts, have brought Joni Mitchell millions of adoring new fans. In the comments of one online video, a recently turned 21 year old poignantly wrote: “Miss Mitchell, she came along at the right time for me.”

British author Zaidie Smith has recounted in the New Yorker how she hated Joni’s music for years, and then suddenly opened up to it where now, listening to it provokes “uncontrollable tears” and joy—“ if joy is the recognition of an almost intolerable beauty.”

When I went to Joni: A Portrait in Song, the Luminato tribute last June at Massey Hall, tears streamed down my face too just hearing some of the words that defined a generation. Most of them were sung by others — like Rufus Wainwright Jr., and the incomparable Esperanza Spalding, while Joni, her voice raspy and oakened, swayed happily on the stage. She sang a couple of numbers — and spoke a fierce poetic tribute to the painter Emily Carr. It’s fair to say she transported most of us to heaven.

But it’s not just a paradisal place of nostalgia. Joni Mitchell also evokes the awe and admiration that comes from seeing the entire arc of a great artist’s career. That piping voice of her early folksinging years. Videos from the ’60s that show her so ladylike on stage.

Yet this was a girl who had been smoking cigarettes since she was 9 — still does, thinks everyone should — and gradually she began to shock her fellow male musicians — Bob Dylan, Crosby Stills, Nash and Young — by the openly confessional tone of her songs. Those searing lyrics still resonate about love and men and the disaster they can create in a woman’s life.

On “Chelsea Morning,” a song Hillary and Bill Clinton said was the reason they named their daughter Chelsea, once you get over the sheer gorgeousness of a line like, “And the sun poured in like butterscotch and stuck to all my senses,” you hear the wistful longing, “If only you will stay….”

Joni Mitchell has been hailed as the greatest singer songwriter of her generation and one of the most influential. Throughout her career, Joni fused jazz into her music before anyone else did, and sang songs about every social concern. What happens to young women who “get caught” as she did, getting pregnant and slipping away to a home for unwed mothers to have her baby, a girl she gave up for adoption but reunited with years later. Drug addiction — “cold blue steel and sweet fire,” income inequality, it’s all there in her work.

Last spring, in the few interviews (including one to the Star) she gave around the concerts, I learned some things about her artistry. She said her lyrics were convoluted even for her to sing — sometimes too many words in a line. She said she related to Beethoven. (Hubris or brave lack of false humility?) And she revealed how bitter she is about being dismissed when she got too experimental.

One of my best friends ran into Joni not too long ago at the Vancouver airport baggage carousel, where she was balancing suitcases and at least one dog. “Hi Joni,” my friend casually said, “do you need some help with that?” Joni said she thought she’d be fine, she was only going for a layover to the nearby Fairmont Hotel — whereupon my friend, with not the best voice in the world, burst into flaming song in front of her hero: “I stayed last night at the Fairmont Hotel….”

Joni smiled, she got it. She called for a porter and went on her way.

Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson

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